CHAPTER 74: Trying The Long Distance
The Tuesday shop had its own rhythm — slower than Saturday, less purposeful than Thursday, the specific pace of a weekday when people came in because they happened to be passing rather than because they'd planned it. Stuart had learned to like Tuesdays. They left room to think.
He wasn't thinking about anything useful.
The laptop was open on the counter, angled toward the register, because the evening call was at seven and it was currently six forty-eight and he'd been checking the clock approximately every ninety seconds for the last hour. He knew he was doing it. He kept doing it anyway.
Both shops were running fine. Pasadena was on schedule, inventory ordered, new issue rack stocked by eleven. Burbank had called at two with a question about a supplier backorder that took four minutes to resolve. The shops were fine. Everything logistical was fine. Stuart was aware that he was using the fine-ness of the logistics to avoid the other accounting, which did not balance as cleanly.
Seven PM. He opened the call.
The video buffered for three seconds — Los Angeles internet, a specific small indignity — and then Penny was there, in the frame, wearing what appeared to be a hotel bathrobe that was probably the apartment's bathrobe, in a small kitchen he'd seen four times now via screen. She had her hair up and she was eating something from a container and she waved the fork when the video connected.
"Hey."
"Hey. Long day?"
"Fourteen hours. We did the scene eleven times." She set the container down. "Eleven. The lighting guy kept having a thing with a shadow."
"The shadow on the wall behind the second camera?"
She pointed the fork at him. "Yes. How did you — you know what, never mind. Yes. That shadow."
They talked for forty minutes. She told him about the director's specific and non-transferable opinions about blocking; he told her about a customer who had argued, at length and in good faith, that the wrong Spider-Man had been on the variant cover of a 1994 issue and had produced documentation on his phone to support this. She laughed at that — actually laughed, the full one, not the conversation-smooth version — and for a moment the call felt like the kitchen on Lake Avenue.
Then her phone buzzed on the counter behind her. She didn't look at it. He watched her not look at it.
"The offer clock?" he said.
A pause. "Four days."
He nodded. She looked at the screen.
"I've been thinking," she said. "I mean, people do the bicoastal thing. It's not — I know people who —"
She stopped. He watched her hear herself.
"Penn —"
"No, I know." She set the fork down. "I know what I just heard myself say."
The call went quiet for a moment. Not the uncomfortable kind — the kind that came from two people choosing not to fill silence with something that wasn't ready to be said yet.
"Tell me about the scene," he said. "The one you did eleven times."
She told him. He listened. The scene sounded good — genuinely good, the kind of good that came through even in secondhand description at seven PM via laptop camera — and he watched her face while she talked, the way she went into the present tense when she was actually engaged, the way her hands moved when she got to the part that had surprised her. He had paid a lot of attention to Penny over the course of a year and a half. He knew what she looked like when she was doing the thing she was supposed to be doing.
The call froze at forty-two minutes in. Mid-laugh — her face caught in the particular shape of finding something genuinely funny, one frame, held. The buffering wheel spun. He watched the frozen frame for five seconds, ten, and then the call dropped entirely.
He called back. It went to voicemail.
She texted: sorry signal died, long day, call tomorrow?
He texted back: of course. Get some sleep.
The laptop screen went dark.
The shop was quiet. One customer in the back corner, a regular who came in every Tuesday around seven and read for an hour before buying whatever he'd had in his hand the longest. Stuart had never asked his name and he'd never offered it and they had a comfortable unspoken understanding about this.
Stuart closed the laptop.
His phone rang. Unknown number, 402 area code. He almost let it go to voicemail, then picked up.
"Stuart." Susan Hofstadter's voice — not Penny's mom as she'd introduced herself at Thanksgiving, not the warm Nebraska-inflected woman who'd suggested he not let this one get away. The other version: direct, measured. "I hope I'm not calling at a bad time."
"No," he said. "Hi, Susan."
"I talked to Penny this afternoon." A pause. "She's not going to tell you what she's thinking, because she doesn't want to make it your problem. So I'm telling you."
He waited.
"There was a man before you. Dan. You know about Dan?"
"Some."
"He was a good man. He loved her. But he needed her present in a way that — she couldn't chase anything. Couldn't take the classes, couldn't take the call-backs. He didn't mean to do it. He just needed her close and she was good and she kept choosing close." A pause. "She spent three years smaller than she was supposed to be."
Stuart looked at the register. At the laptop sitting closed.
"I'm not him," he said.
"I know that." Susan's voice had something in it he couldn't quite name — not warmth, exactly, but a kind of seriousness that was its own form of respect. "But loving her and making her smaller are two things that can happen at the same time, without anyone deciding that's what they're doing. That's what I called to tell you."
The Tuesday customer had drifted toward the register, paperback in hand. Stuart held up a finger — one minute — and the man nodded and waited.
"Thank you," Stuart said, into the phone. "I mean it."
"I know," Susan said, and hung up.
He processed the transaction. The regular paid in exact change, which he always did, and said, "Good night," which he always said, and left. The shop was empty.
Stuart stood at the register for a moment.
There was a version of the next four days where he engineered something — where he framed the conversation so that she could stay and feel like she'd chosen it. He knew the tools for that. He was good at knowing the right thing to say in the right order. He'd spent two years in this body getting good at it.
He wasn't going to do that.
The decision arrived less like a choice and more like a thing that had already been true and was now acknowledged. He would not be the reason she stayed. He would not build a version of events where she looked back in five years and realized that she had chosen something smaller than herself because someone she loved had needed her close.
He would do this right.
He locked the register, cut the front lights, and walked to the back to close up.
At nine-seventeen, he opened the laptop, found the still frame he'd screenshotted when the call froze — reflex, not intention — looked at it once, and closed the laptop again.
That was what it was. He put his keys in his pocket and turned off the back light.